Beyond the Point

by Damien Boyd

  ‘It’s correct.’

  A picture of a lettuce; and oddly enough ‘lettuce’ wasn’t on the list. ‘Diet’ was though, and ‘salad’, so he wrote them on the board underneath the photograph and moved on to the next.

  The Incredible Hulk. Dixon hated cryptic crosswords at the best of times.

  ‘Let me have a look, Sir.’ Pearce snatched the list from his hand, the waft of beer unmistakable.

  Dixon waited, puzzlement etched across his forehead.

  ‘This is fun,’ said Pearce. ‘Give me the pen.’ Then he wrote the word ‘banner’ underneath the photograph.

  ‘Banner?’ demanded Louise.

  ‘Bruce Banner.’ Pearce grinned. ‘He’s the character who becomes the Incredible Hulk when he gets angry. You must’ve seen the film?’

  ‘No, I haven’t.’ Dixon stood up. ‘Right, that’s it. I’m going to drop Monty home and get something to eat. I’ll be back later.’

  ‘Even if we get past this, we’ve still got to find his pin number,’ said Pearce.

  ‘Let’s hope it’s his date of birth,’ replied Dixon. ‘He used it for his phone passcode. And he clearly thinks the passphrase is uncrackable. Maybe he was more relaxed about the pin number.’

  ‘What do we do if not?’

  ‘Let’s worry about that if and when we get there. All right?’

  Chapter Thirty

  Once through the door of the Red Cow, Dixon dropped Monty’s lead and watched the dog make a beeline for their usual table in the corner by the fire.

  ‘A pint for me, please, Rob, and whatever they’re having.’

  ‘They’ve got fish and chips on order too?’

  ‘Yes, please.’

  ‘Nice to see His Lordship out and about.’ The barman smiled. ‘We had your lot upstairs for three days on the lookout for Steiner.’ He looked up as he was pulling Dixon’s pint. ‘Caught your poisoner instead.’

  Dixon fished his wallet out of his back pocket.

  ‘I would have told you, only they said not to,’ continued Rob.

  ‘Don’t worry about it.’

  A drink in each hand and another trapped between his fingertips. ‘He’s given you a Diet Coke, Lucy. Is that all right?’ asked Dixon, placing the drinks on the table.

  ‘Fine, thanks.’

  ‘Is this by way of an apology?’ Jane frowned.

  ‘What for?’

  ‘Severn Beach indeed. What the bloody hell’s at Severn Beach? We raced back from Worle expecting to find you on Berrow—’

  ‘She’s winding you up,’ said Lucy, grinning.

  Dixon sighed.

  ‘He smiled then,’ said Jane, turning to her sister. ‘I’m sure he did.’

  ‘I’ve been smiling since I came out of the vet’s, thanks to you,’ he said, wrapping his arms around Jane and kissing her. ‘And you.’ He leaned over and hugged Lucy, sitting in the corner.

  Jane looked down at Monty stretched out on the floor in front of the fire. ‘Has he had his tablet?’

  ‘And his supper.’

  ‘We just need to find a way of getting rid of that green stain around his muzzle.’

  ‘It’ll soon go.’

  ‘Looks like he’s thrown up,’ muttered Lucy.

  ‘I’ll have your mushy peas then?’ Dixon laughed.

  ‘Shut up!’

  ‘What’s happened to Chard?’ asked Jane.

  ‘He’s been released pending investigation. Potter said he’ll be charged with criminal damage on top of whatever else; perverting the course of justice, probably.’

  ‘He’ll go down for that lot.’

  ‘A couple of years, I expect.’

  ‘Tosser,’ said Lucy.

  ‘She’s a good judge of character, your sister.’ Dixon took a swig of beer.

  ‘What did you find at Severn Beach?’

  ‘A cryptic crossword. Twelve photos on his iPhone and a twelve word passphrase to crack his bitcoin wallet.’

  ‘I’m good at crosswords,’ said Lucy.

  Dixon slid his phone out of his pocket and opened the word list. ‘Find a word in that list that matches a picture of the Incredible Hulk then, clever clogs.’ He watched her scrolling down through the list. ‘That’ll keep her busy for a—’

  ‘Banner!’

  Dixon rolled his eyes. ‘Bruce,’ he said.

  ‘Give me another one,’ said Lucy.

  ‘There’s a picture of a small river with the sun shining through the trees beyond it.’

  ‘Give me a minute.’ Lucy grinned. ‘Any flowers?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Not “blossom” then. It could be “meadow”.’ More scrolling and sighing. ‘“River” . . . or “tree”. Next.’

  ‘Who’s having tartare sauce?’ asked Rob, standing over them with a plate of fish and chips in each hand.

  ‘Saved by the bell,’ muttered Dixon.

  It was just before 10 p.m. when Dixon arrived back at Express Park. Louise, Dave and Mark had been joined by DCI Lewis, who was sitting on the corner of a workstation frowning at the whiteboard.

  ‘Ah, there you are,’ he said, when Dixon appeared at the top of the stairs.

  ‘How’s it going?’

  ‘We’ve got something credible for most of them. We don’t like this one though,’ replied Lewis, pointing to the ninth photograph along. ‘All we can find is “flight” and it doesn’t seem close enough.’

  ‘Why a Spitfire?’ asked Pearce, shrugging his shoulders.

  ‘Let me have a look at the list,’ said Dixon, sitting down on a swivel chair in front of the whiteboard. He began flicking through the pages.

  ‘It can’t really be “airport” either,’ said Louise.

  Dixon dropped the list on to the workstation behind him. ‘Pen,’ he said, holding out his hand.

  ‘What is it?’ asked Lewis, handing him his marker pen.

  ‘Never in the field of human conflict has so much been owed by so many to so . . .’ His voice tailed off as he wrote the word ‘FEW’ in block capitals underneath the photograph of the Spitfire.

  ‘Few,’ said Lewis, through a long sigh.

  ‘For fuck’s sake,’ muttered Harding.

  ‘You really are a bunch of—’

  ‘It’s nice to have you back, Sir.’ Pearce grinned.

  ‘Shut up, Mark.’

  ‘Yes, Sir.’

  ‘What do we do now?’ asked Louise.

  ‘We try every combination until we get through to the login screen,’ replied Dixon.

  ‘I’ll leave you to it,’ said Lewis. ‘I haven’t seen my wife for a week. She’s probably run off with the milkman.’

  Dixon looked along the line of photographs as Louise powered up a computer. Lucy had been spot on, the words ‘meadow’, ‘river’ and ‘tree’ scribbled underneath that photograph.

  Several only had one word underneath – the photograph of the ‘bullet’, for example. And the ‘can’. He stared at the photograph of the Second Severn Crossing, the word ‘bridge’ scribbled underneath. Surely it meant more to Scanlon than that?

  ‘We think that last one’s “advance”,’ said Harding, pointing to a black and white photograph of troops advancing across no man’s land.

  ‘It’s a still from the original version of All Quiet on the Western Front,’ said Dixon.

  ‘Bollocks,’ muttered Pearce. ‘Front’s on the list so we’d best add it.’

  ‘Quiet isn’t.’ Dixon dropped the list on to the vacant chair.

  ‘What do I do then?’ asked Louise, gesturing to the screen in front of her.

  ‘Try the top one of each and see what happens.’

  ‘Trouble is, Sir,’ said Harding, frowning, ‘if it doesn’t work, we won’t know which answer is wrong, will we?’

  ‘So we keep trying until we get in.’

  ‘We could be here all bloody night!’

  Dixon smiled. ‘Well?’ he asked, turning to Louise.

  ‘Error, invalid passphrase,’ she said. ‘The words are
still there though, so I don’t have to retype them every time.’

  ‘I’d stick them on the clipboard, just to be on the safe side,’ said Pearce.

  ‘Change “diamond” to “jewel” and see what happens,’ said Dixon.

  ‘Same again,’ said Louise, glaring at the screen in front of her.

  ‘All right, all right. Let’s start with the words we think it’s most likely to be and see where that gets us. So, “jewel”.’

  ‘Not “diamond”?’ asked Pearce.

  ‘Too obvious. Then “diet”, “banner”, “loan”, then—’

  ‘What about “borrow”?’

  ‘It’s a “loan shark”, Dave. Not a “borrow shark”,’ said Pearce.

  ‘I just thought it was too obvious, that’s all.’

  Dixon rolled his eyes. ‘What’s next: “three”, “code”, “bullet”, “meadow”, “few”, “can”, “bridge” and lastly “advance”.’

  Louise sighed. ‘Error, invalid passphrase. And I’m locked out for an hour now.’

  ‘That’ll be done by the IP address,’ said Pearce. ‘Give High Tech a call and they can assign you a new one.’

  ‘They’ll need to keep doing it,’ muttered Louise. ‘We really are going to be here all night.’

  ‘We need to do this methodically,’ said Dixon, sitting down behind a vacant computer and switching it on. ‘If we each try different combinations, we should get there in the end.’

  By 4 a.m. Dave Harding and Mark Pearce had gone home, leaving Dixon and Louise sitting at workstations covered in plastic coffee cups. Someone had switched off the coffee machine at midnight, but the kettle in the CID Area came to their rescue.

  Dixon stacked his coffee cups and dropped them in the recycling bin. ‘One of them must be wrong,’ he said, turning back to the whiteboard.

  ‘Just one?’ asked Louise, stifling a yawn.

  ‘Did you ring your husband?’

  ‘He’s fine. He understands.’

  ‘Where’s the word list?’ asked Dixon, spinning round. He snatched a copy off Louise’s workstation and began looking down the words. ‘Go through the combinations again, but instead of “bridge” try “accident”.’

  ‘OK,’ said Louise.

  He was flicking through the pages, listening to Louise talking to herself behind him while he scanned down the list: ‘now’, ‘nuclear’, ‘number’, ‘nurse’, ‘nut’.

  He froze.

  ‘Stop what you’re doing.’

  ‘What is it?’ asked Louise, looking up from behind her computer.

  ‘Change “accident” to “nut” and try again.’

  ‘Nut?’

  ‘How was the platform sabotaged?’

  ‘The nuts and bolts were . . .’ Louise’s voice tailed off.

  ‘You can just imagine the tosser each time he logged in.’ Dixon sneered. ‘A private joke.’

  ‘It isn’t private anymore.’

  ‘No, it bloody well isn’t.’

  Dixon was standing in the window watching the sun come up when Louise screamed.

  ‘I’m through to the next screen. It says “Enter Your Pin”!’

  ‘What were the words?’ he asked, running over to the whiteboard.

  Louise waited until Dixon had cleaned it and picked up a pen. ‘They’re “jewel”, “diet”, “banner”, “borrow”, “three”, “code”, “bullet”, “meadow”, “few”, “can”, “nut”, “front”.’

  ‘That’s a good night’s work, Lou,’ he said. ‘You go home, get some sleep. And don’t set your alarm.’

  A few hours’ sleep on the sofa, the sun just coming up as he had closed his eyes. It would have to do.

  Now he was standing on platform 1 at Highbridge railway station with Lucy, waiting for the 0912 to Bristol Temple Meads.

  ‘Thank you for helping with Monty.’

  ‘It’s fine. I’m just glad he’s going to be OK.’

  ‘Me too.’

  ‘I am coming to the Lakes with you when you go?’

  ‘Yes, of course. We’ll pick you up on the way. All right?’

  Lucy smiled. ‘Your phone’s buzzing.’

  An 01823 number. ‘Not the bloody hospital again,’ he said under his breath, frowning at the screen before holding it to his ear. ‘Nick Dixon.’

  ‘Mr Dixon, it’s Danielle at the diabetic centre, Musgrove Park Hospital. I rang you a few days ago about your retinopathy results. You were going to ring me back on Monday and never did.’

  ‘Yes, sorry. I’m right in the middle of—’

  ‘I don’t want to worry you, but it is very urgent and we need to get you in sooner rather than later.’

  Dixon turned away when Lucy crept up behind him. ‘Can I call you back?’

  ‘We can do next Friday now, there’s an appointment at four o’clock with the ophthalmologist, Mrs Jobson. That’s a week tomorrow. Is that any good for you?’

  ‘I haven’t got my diary in front of me, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Well, let’s put you in for that and you ring me if you can’t come. How does that suit?’

  ‘Er,’ Dixon sighed, ‘fine, I suppose.’

  ‘I’ll write to confirm it. Thank you.’

  Dixon rang off.

  ‘Who was that?’ asked Lucy, frowning.

  ‘Just somebody trying to sell me something.’

  ‘No, it wasn’t.’

  ‘Your train’s coming,’ said Dixon, picking up her bag and trying to change the subject at the same time.

  ‘There’s a problem with your eyes, isn’t there? What’s retinopathy?’

  The train stopped and he opened the doors, throwing Lucy’s bag into the carriage.

  She held the doors open with her hand and leaned out, scowling at him. ‘It’s serious, isn’t it? You’re going blind!’

  ‘I am not going blind.’

  ‘If you don’t tell her, I will.’

  ‘All right, all right.’

  Lucy grinned. ‘And for fuck’s sake, ask her to marry you.’

  Twenty minutes later, Dixon was sitting at a workstation in the CID Area at Express Park, Jane perched on the corner.

  ‘You cracked it then?’ she asked.

  ‘Louise did the hard work,’ replied Dixon.

  ‘Did Lucy get her train?’

  ‘Yes. I promised her we’d pick her up on the way to the Lakes.’

  ‘You’ve got to finish this first, haven’t you?’ Jane was looking at the papers spread out across the workstation in front of Dixon. ‘What’s all this?’

  ‘The 1995 prosecution file. There’s just something bugging me. I can’t believe I missed it, to be honest.’ He leaned back in his chair and folded his arms. ‘Think about it. Four bolts are tampered with and the platform collapses. They’re either undone or cut with a hacksaw, I expect we’ll never know, but only one is found when the seabed is searched. A nut that’s sheared off.’

  ‘You think it was planted?’

  ‘It must have been. The others are probably still down there. And there’s no statement anywhere from the diver who found it. Or any photographs.’

  ‘It would’ve been a police diver, surely?’

  ‘Exactly. I’m guessing his statement wasn’t disclosed so it was in the folder that Stella got hold of. Perhaps it exhibited a set of photographs? She must’ve recognised the name, put two and two together somehow and got killed for her trouble.’ Hands behind his head now. ‘Whoever it is, there must be a connection with Scanlon.’

  ‘Maybe they’re both working at Hinkley?’ Jane leaned over and kissed Dixon on the cheek. ‘You need a shave,’ she said, rubbing his chin.

  ‘Thank you, Sergeant.’

  It was moments like this that made it all worthwhile, thought Dixon, as he waited for the barrier to open at the Avon and Somerset Police Headquarters at Portishead. He was watching the officer on duty in the guardhouse, phone to his ear. Then he lifted the barrier and waved the car in front of Dixon through.

  That feeling of bein
g on the right track, knowing that it was just a matter of time. Usually he didn’t have long enough to savour it. This time was different.

  He wondered whether Stella was watching, wherever she was. He hoped so.

  ‘Name?’

  ‘Dixon,’ he replied, presenting his warrant card.

  ‘Visiting?’

  ‘The archive.’

  ‘I’ll ring them and let them know you’re coming.’

  ‘No need,’ he replied, smiling.

  The guardhouse officer’s medals were still jangling as Dixon accelerated under the barrier and followed the service road around to the archive unit in the basement of the admin block.

  ‘You look like shit,’ said the clerical officer behind the counter, a pair of reading glasses balanced on top of his head.

  Dixon had been warned about the banter. ‘It’s been a long night,’ he said, forcing a smile.

  ‘What can I do you for?’

  ‘Dive team records. I’m told they’re here.’

  ‘We’ve only got pre-2002.’

  ‘1995. There was a search of the seabed under the Second Severn Crossing.’

  ‘What d’you want?’

  ‘Everything you’ve got.’

  ‘Give me a minute.’

  Dixon sat down on a split plastic chair, leaned back against the wall and closed his eyes. But there was no chance of going to sleep. Not now.

  He checked his phone. No signal. It was one advantage of working in a basement, perhaps. But then he would miss the sunrise. Maybe Express Park wasn’t all bad.

  ‘It’s weird,’ said the clerical officer, reappearing at the counter, his reading glasses on the end of his nose. ‘There’s nothing. No statements or photos, so I’m guessing they didn’t find anything?’

  ‘Is there a log or anything like that?’

  ‘There’ll be the dive team supervisor’s logbook, but that’s just dates, places and personnel.’

  ‘That’ll do,’ said Dixon. He could feel a bead of sweat running down the small of his back. His breathing quickening too. Definitely not a hypo. He’d had breakfast in the canteen at Express Park as soon as it opened and done his jab.

  ‘Here it is,’ said the officer, placing a large green book on the counter. He opened it to reveal handwritten entries; different pens, different handwriting. ‘When was it?’